The The Gazette uses Instaread for audio versions of our articles. Note that text-to-speech may cause some pronunciation errors.

Project 2025’s call for turning the nation’s environmental watchdogs into lapdogs will seem familiar to Iowans.

We’re living it. We’re swimming in it. We’re drinking it.

You may recall Project 2025, written primarily by former Trump administration officials and published by the Heritage foundation. It’s a policy blueprint should Donald Trump win.

Trump has denounced the unpopular project. But you can’t believe anything the guy says.

We live in a state where environmental protection is no match for protecting farmers and agricultural landowners from taking responsibility for pollutants flowing from crops and livestock into Iowa’s waterways. There’s no power to match the agricultural corporation who sell fertilizer and other farm chemicals.

Does all this dirty water have an effect on Iowa’s rising cancer rates? Don’t ask.

Regulations requiring farming operations to take steps to mitigate pollution are adamantly opposed by Republicans who run the state. Most Democrats also oppose regulations for fear they’ll lose rural votes they aren’t getting.

The Iowa Environmental Protection Commission is dominated by members with ties to agriculture. The Department of Natural Resources is understaffed, underfunded and led by political appointees who serve at the pleasure of Gov. Kim Reynolds — friend of hog barons and emperors of ethanol. Even if the EPC approved stronger rules to fight pollution, the rules have to go through a gatekeeper in Reynolds’ office.

Iowa energy regulators approved carbon capture pipelines, not as a climate mitigation tool, but to prop up ethanol, which comes with its own large environmental cost.

So, Iowans have nowhere to turn when it comes to cleaning up our water. The DNR doesn’t even have enough power to keep a huge cattle feedlot out of the watershed around an “outstanding” trout stream.

And if Donald Trump wins, and his administration follows the Project 2025 blueprint, we’ll no longer be able to seek federal help.

One of the plan’s major goals is to replace thousands of career civil servants with political appointees loyal to the Trump regime. Career civil servants would certainly include scientists who conduct research contradicting his agenda.

The Environmental Protection Agency would be, basically, gutted. Its power to address pollution through regulation would be dramatically reduced. And several offices within the EPA would be eliminated or reinvented under the plan.

That includes the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurances, blunting the EPA’s ability to enforce existing environmental protection laws, such as the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.

It will be easier to drain wetlands for development, but tougher to regulate chemicals, including forever chemicals. More public land will be available for oil drilling.

The Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to create national monuments to protect vulnerable lands, would be repealed. The Endangered Species Act would be rewritten. And energy efficiency standards for appliances would be repealed or modified.

Just try to take my gas stove, you jackbooted commies.

As you might have read in this space before, Project 2025 calls for dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service and scientists conducting climate research Republicans do not like. Forecasting will be privatized to companies currently using NWS data in their forecasting. Smart.

Also, climate change is a punch line or no big deal.

At a New York Times Climate Forward event this past week, Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts brushed off the scientific consensus that human activities are warming the planet. Rising global temperatures already have a hand in devastating natural disasters.

“It sounds like weather to me, a hot year,” Roberts said.

And there’s no global warming because it snowed!

Mandy Gunasekara, a former Trump EPA chief of staff, wrote that sounding climate alarms is "a favored tool that the left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty crushing regulations." She wrote the Project 2025 section on climate.

But don’t call Heritage or the project’s authors climate deniers. No, sir.

“So there's two different types of scientific conversations,” Gunasekara said during an interview last year on NPR.

“There is a politicized version that most people are exposed to … There is an actual substantive conversation — but scientifically substanced — with a number of scientists all over the country, all over the world, where they understand that the outlook is more mild and manageable,” she said.

Mild and manageable. Sounds like a shampoo ad. But not a Category 4 Hurricane.

Remember, concerns about consequences of climate warming are “politicized.” Pretend nothing bad is happening is “substantive.” Got it.

Of course, it’s not hard to guess what sort of policies spring from those positions.

We’d pull out of virtually all international efforts to slow or stop warming. Government agencies should stop talking about climate effects that won’t happen. For example, climate change would no longer be figured into military threat assessments, despite the reality that climate disasters will feed conflicts.

The Inflation Reduction Act approved by Congress, including an unprecedented effort to rein in emissions fueling climate change, would be repealed if Heritage gets its way.

The federal government which would, under Trump, basically put profits ahead of people adversely affected by environmental degradation. And it would hand more power to states to approve locally harmful environmental policies. Swell

“I think first and foremost, it is making sure that we respect the concept of cooperative federalism. So it's the federal government working alongside the states to achieve meaningful improvements to the air, land, water and reducing emissions,” Gunasekara told NPR.

Meaningful, in this context, means “next to nothing.”

Iowa agriculture clearly will be harmed by climate change as heavy rains cause more flooding, droughts become longer and more intense and devastating pests once foreign to Iowa move north. And yet, under the Golden Dome of Wisdom, now redder than a heat dome, GOP leaders don’t mention it. Makes them sound like libs.

There are legislative action that could pass. Our state flower should be a fertilizer-fed algae bloom. The state fish? The “Floating Upside Down Channel Catfish.”

So, Iowans already know how to be angry, frustrated and powerless to clean up the state’s rivers, lakes and decaying state park facilities.

And, understandably, many are Iowans are worried about what Trump, his minions and the states will do to harm the environment even more. But no worries. I hear it will be “mild and manageable.” Sort of like a derecho.

(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com